After no coverage, Daily Mail uses equal marriage a week after it became law to attack David Cameron
A week since the equal marriage act for England and Wales was given Royal Assent, and despite little or no previous coverage, the Daily Mail and Telegraph, have reported the story, in critical pieces regarding a speech made by David Cameron.
Last week, the Daily Telegraph online initially ran with the headline “Weddings now ‘meaningless’ says church as gay marriage is legalised”. A column on same-sex marriage by Culture Secretary Maria Miller was published online but did not make it into the print edition.
The Daily Mail did not run the story in print but it did publish a story about two convicted French killers having a same-sex marriage in prison.
Today’s article in the Mail mentioned that equal marriage had been given Royal Assent last week, but went on to say that the Prime MInister “risked controversy” by suggesting that he wanted to “spread gay marriage around the world.”
During a speech given yesterday at a reception held to celebrate the Assent of the Marriage (Same Sex Couples) Act, David Cameron said: “Many countries are going to want to copy this. I talk about how we’ve got to export more, so I’m going to export the Bill team… I think they can take it around the world.”
In a second piece in the Mail, an opinion piece by controversial columnist Richard Littlejohn, David Cameron is compared to gay character Daffyd from comedy series Little Britain, and called “the only gay in the global village”.
Littlejohn’s column goes on to claim to be speaking out of care for the “gay lobby”, saying that “Homosexuals in Pakistan still run a very real risk of being stoned to death. And in Jamaica and other Caribbean countries, they take a notoriously dim view of what they call ‘batty boys'”.
He asks: “What does he hope to achieve by embarking on a mission to proselytise same-sex marriage around the world, other than to bask in the admiration of the gay lobby?
Later, he argues that accepting gay rights should be a condition of receiving aid from the UK, before saying: “We might just as well fly over the Third World tipping bales of ten pound notes out of an aeroplane.”
The Telegraph piece, also published today, was critical of Mr Cameron for saying that he would “personally” thank the Queen for signing the Act.
It read: “the Queen could hardly not have given her assent to the [bill]”, and criticised him for saying that he would “personally” thank her.
